The Man Who Loved Children (47 page)

“Sam,” said Saul fervently, “when you talk, you know you create a world. I live in a wonderful illusion: especially when we take walks at night, I can hardly believe in the workaday world! I can even hardly believe it is you talking: you have such wonderful faith.”

“Faith,” said Sam, “yes, I have faith: that is the great gift my dear good mother gave me: faith in the good.”

“But why does faith prevent you from answering the charges made against you?” asked Saul.

“Who touches pitch is defiled,” said Sam.

“You will lose everything, Sam: position, salary, pension. What about your children?”

“I’ll never answer such wicked charges,” Sam declared, scarlet with indignation, “and if my children have to live in utmost poverty, let them do what I have done. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity, which like a toad ugly and venomous, still has a precious jewel in its head,’ said silly old Broadway Willy Shakespeare. I don’t go much by what poets say, but he was a man, he had his reverses, as his verses sometimes show.”

Saul laughed heartily, cast a sidelong glance at his intimate, but said nothing on this head.

S
TRANGERS BEGAN TO DRIVE
white surveyors’ pegs into the children’s own gardens at Tohoga House, and everyone was glad to go. Sam had been scouting round the district for weeks, looking for a suitable nest for his young ones. He could not bring himself (considering his dubious prospects, too) to rent or buy a house in the ugly new dormitory districts used by Washingtonians, expensive and inconvenient, and now that the Collyer glory had faded, he yearned to go home, back to the old-fashioned, heterogeneous views at the head of the Chesapeake tidewater country. Baltimore has many exiles, as near as Washington, as far as Heidelberg, who never cease reviling their native town with soft-tongued, exquisite scurrility, whose hunger to be away from Baltimore and obsession with the town create an appetite for Baltimore in the stranger. Baltimore is multifarious; has the attractive dirt of a fishing town, the nightmare horizons of a great industrial town; it is very old, sordid, traditional, and proud. It despises no sort of traffic that can be conceived of; it is not fanatical; it has a self-sufficiency as towns of old Europe, even in the hideous yellow waste bays full of abandoned shacks, the mazy sameness of its mean, white-stepped streets, its traffic in pleasures both respectable and disreputable. It is at the head of an inland sea and stands between natural sea-level parks and thick-wooded hills. It does not imprison. Nature has no states’ rights in Maryland. Baltimore sees the meeting of two cultures of man, Northern and Southern. There mingle from the southeastern sands to the Appalachian crests two regions of trees and plants, and two of birds and fish. Sam loved his state with passion. Released from what he dimly saw had been a bondage to the Collyer idea of financial success, Sam with love and longing had hurried round the residentials of Baltimore during the past few weeks, until he found a real home for his children. For him no apartments, no town slums and modern jerry-builts. He had resolved that even if he went back to his own old position as a Deputy Commissioner of the Conservation Bureau (and he was sick of it), he would motor to Washington every day, a matter of fifty minutes perhaps, and bring his children up on this waterside, where he had fished for gudgeon as a child.

Henny refused to take any interest in the house-hunting, only saying bitterly that she hoped he wasn’t going to plank her down in rotten old Baltimore right next to some flossy friend of her schooldays who had done a million times better than she had. Henny still had some belief in Sam’s abilities and his way of getting away with it, as she put it, but she saw bursting out in him a hothouse flower of idealism that he had kept in bud during Collyer’s lifetime. He had conceived, since his Pacific trip, a gigantic plan. He had every hope of being appointed one of the American members of the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission in a few months and he had views which he much regretted not being able to put before the whaling conference in London in June. Beyond that was the four-day September meeting of the North American Council, and conferences of other bodies to follow.

Sam, a great partisan of the Roosevelt works plans because of the work done in fish and forestry conservation by the W.P.A. and C.C.C. workers (hatcheries in North Carolina, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Texas, and elsewhere), and seeing with pleasure new works being acquired from several states and placed under the surveillance or control of Federal bureaus, saw in President Roosevelt the first great socialist ruler, greater and more answerable than any European chief because serving so short a term. He favored a bureaucratic state socialism with the widest possible powers and a permanent staff, a bureaucracy intricately engineered, which would gradually engulf all the powers great and small o£ what Sam called, with a tinge of elegance, “govam’nt.” But states having rights, the relations of states and the Federal Government must be negotiated by Interstate Commissions with their Commissioners, both full and deputy, attached. Sam had in his head this plan for the knitting together of all the state and Federal conservation services, eventually to be made into an immense North American Conference, which would foreshadow the All-American Republic; and on top of this an International Conservation League of Nations which, by regulating supplies and conserving instead of wasting, would prevent wars and feed all people.

This plan, with an infinity of councils, subcouncils, and town meetings, Sam had got down on paper before he left. He hoped it would have borne fruit in his absence; and within a year or two he hoped to be named, with others, to this Supreme Conservation Council. Roosevelt, loved of “the people,” could do all. Sam believed that it was opposition to this grand socialist plan which was fermenting in the Department; and to his proposition that a quarter of a million dollars should be the petty cash at first allocated to the new branch of Federal Government therein proposed. In his mind’s eye he saw internations within internations; and overnations over nations, all separate functions of Federal Government rising to one crest of supreme judgment, sitting in a room; all glass, no doubt, with windows on the world; each power of government to be independent, though interdependent. Sam had numerous codicils to add to his great scheme, after his taste of Imperial Government, not that he admired it—he thought the American system far more modern—but he liked the word
farflung,
the farflung bournes of conservation, and
public necessity’s eminent domain.
Sam was a vague eclectic socialist, and some of the things he wrote were far more horrifying to his friends than he understood; not to mention that he went about proclaiming fair play in opinion and saying that there was some good, no doubt, in the U.S.S.R.’s system as well as holiness in the ideas of Confucius.

“I wish I could go to jail for my ideas,” he said more than once, in a burst of fervor, “and then scoffers—there are scoffers even at my patent sincerity—would see how deeply I feel these ideas.”

Sam with all this behind him, then, did not feel as anxious as his friends about the present attack on him: it was the rotten fabric woven by evil, the overnight sham bulwarks of enemies of the people; it would burn to ash at the match of truth. Besides Sam had powerful friends who loved the truth.

Some of this, indeed, all of this, he was able to tell the children while the old Pollit sedan was passing out of Washington and into the wooded areas on the road to Annapolis. But when they reached the richer part of the wooded road, he broke off and began to talk to them about the Free State of Maryland which would from now on be their home, how it was the first, finest, richest of the states and that with the most vision, how its foreshows had remained untouched because the pikes had had to go far inland to avoid the marshes and watercourses. No sight on earth was like the moonlight on the Choptank, and he made a great many other remarks which proved that it was only after a strict examination of all the other states in the Union, he had impartially chosen the Free State to be born in. Then he sang them a song of the trees of his home state, the oaks, red oak, scarlet oak, black oak, white oak, water oak and willow oak, shingle oak and post oak, mosscup oak and overcup oak, rock oak and swamp oak and all the others, elms, maples, hickories, dogwoods, persimmons, and pines, from Rising Sun to Snow Hill, Port Tobacco to Port Deposit, Liberty Town to Bohemia Manor, Fox Hill Levels to Deep Creek Lake, Spaniard’s Neck to Indian Head, Love Point to West Friendship, Cole to The Bunker, Governor’s Run to Cover, Humphrey to Pumphrey and Beaver Dam to Bivalve and a great many more which he had worked up into a recitative for them months and years ago, showing them the map and teaching them the counties. When they came into Anne Arundel county, he began to show them the soils and trees of the county that would be their future home and expressed a hope that in a very short time they would beat him at distinguishing every natural feature, because they were boys at liberty to roam and he was their busy father, earning bread and lemonade for them all.

To all of this Henny, her weary face a little softened by the fresh summer air, said nothing, but held the baby in her lap and sometimes hushed one of the boys who shrieked too loudly.

But as they went along, nothing could bottle up their effervescence, and every half minute one of them asked, “Are we nearly there?” “What’s the house like?” “When will the animals get there?” and “Is the first van of furniture there yet?” Sam meanwhile being very happy to answer each and all of the questions and not even once rebuking or frowning at any of his little citizens. The sun sizzled, the birds sang, they saw two baby rabbits foolishly sitting on the roadside and startled a pheasant. It was the finest holiday imaginable. They had all left school before the end of the term and would go no more till the summer was over.

Henny thought of this as she scudded along and worried about two things: how she could get help to set the house in order, and how, without Louie’s help, she would manage through the summer (for she had determined to send Louisa to Harpers Ferry again). Sam was still going into the Department but himself confessed in her hearing (they were not speaking) that there was talk of his immediate suspension until the Civil Service Commission could inquire into the whole confusing business. It had all blown up out of nothing at all, out of those vague “enemies” and “evil ones” whom Sam had mentioned for many years.

Then they began to pass indications of summer camps and new houses, half finished in new clearings, and came into the older cottages settled behind Annapolis. At length, wild with excitement, experiencing disappointment, after the grandeur of Washington, they drove round State Circle, were unable to admire what Sam admired, the colonial charm of the State House, the pleasant retirement of St. John’s College (though they saw quickly enough the little black kitten hiding in its bushes). But when Sam drove them slowly down College Avenue to King George Street, and they could see the Academy, they were excited, though the boys declared nothing would induce them to associate with such flossies, yet they would be glad enough to get in to see the Orioles v. Navy when they could; and suddenly thinking of this, Annapolis appeared to them a great and glorious place; it burst forth in the most brilliant colors. Having achieved his effect, Sam smiled and drove them back by cobbled Randall Street to the Market Space and saw the Dock, and so with them asking frenziedly, all the time, “Where is it, our House, Pad?” “But where do we live?” by Compromise Street to the Eastport Bridge. Until this moment, Henny had not had too many qualms about the place where she would have to bring up her brood. She had visited Annapolis so very often when a girl that she liked it, and yet because it was old and isolated, she knew she could avoid her old friends there or meet them there, as she pleased. She knew they were to have a house with two acres and a water frontage, and she had imagined one of the old, pretentious houses some distance up Spa Creek, or one of the primly coquettish little brick affairs standing in rows down to the boat basin. The view was exquisite there, at nightfall rivaling in stillness and sheen some little foreign lake of postcard fame. But they were to cross the Eastport Bridge. Eastport is a pleasant, little, hopeless, poor mudbank, level with the broad and shallow Chesapeake. The Chesapeake at this point is not picturesque and scarcely salt. The Eastport Bridge, low, awkward, and makeshift, looks as if it had been thrown across by an army in a hurry and forgotten there. Spa Creek is rimmed with modern and even expensive houses on the Annapolis side, but on the Eastport side to which they were now crossing, it is rimmed by a couple of slipways, boatsheds, dilapidated family houses with crumbling loamy banks and long grass down to the thick water. On the Bay side are jetties, gardens, yachts, and powerboats for bay and sea fishing. It is the sort of place for a fisherman, a mudstalker and hookbaiter, but seems pretty messy, wet, and penurious to any other person. Sam belonged to the first sort and Henny to the majority.

The children craned from the car like geese at Thanksgiving from their crates, gabbling about the yachts, jetties, and shrieking “Which house is it, Dad?” for they knew it was near the bridge and on the water. They fixed on a tidy house with a private jetty on the left hand but Ernie picked out a large tumble-down place, two stories with an attic, on the right hand, right on the shallow reach above the bridge.

“Yes,” said Sam excitedly, “Yes, Ermy, Ermy right as per usual: it is, it is, the cannon’s opening roar.”

“Is it ours, Ded?” inquired Evie, viewing it with alarm because it was so different from Tohoga House, and she had pictured an identical place. Henny stared at the ugly old castle comedown, with its rooms upon rooms and unkempt grounds, and looked as if she would cry, but not a word came out of her until Charles-Franklin whimpered. Then she muttered, “No wonder!” Meanwhile the twins were shouting, “Can we sleep upstairs on the balcony?” and Ernie shrieked, “Wait till you get there, you dopes!”